City to Rehab ‘Chronically Vacant’ Rent-Stabilized Apartments for Tenants With Vouchers
Last year, 38,621 of the roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the five boroughs were registered as vacant—an affront, housing advocates say, at a time when the city faces record-high rents and more than 70,000 people sleeping in homeless shelters each night. A new initiative will spend $10 million to renovate 400 of those units this year so tenants with housing vouchers, who often face discrimination from landlords and brokers when searching for a rental, can move in.
But some property owners said the $25,000 price limit isn’t enough to cover the "massive upgrades" that many rent-stabilized units need to be habitable. Housing advocates, though, question whether the city should be subsidizing the repairs at all, pointing to a history of what they describe as "predatory" warehousing of regulated apartments by unscrupulous landlords.
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